AMD discovers several Fusion mantras, disses Larrabee

Mike Magee in Austin Texas, 4th November 2009

Rick Bergman, general manager of AMD’s product group waxed long about the Fusion family of products today.

Bergman has a new mantra. He said: “Every year we’re going to have the best CPU in the industry. It’s our new mantra." He has a history in the industry that includes IBM, TI, a PowerPC Mac clone, ATI and now AMD. The ATI people appear to have more or less taken over AMD from the inside.

AMD has a heap of new mantras but Fusion won’t be released until 2011, when graphics processor and CPU end up on the same die and the interconnect is thus made far easier.

He said that GPU scaling gives 2X performance every 18 months and AMD is not slowing down in CPU perfrmance either. The GPU gives the best performance per watt per dollar, he said. “We’re totally focused on the platform now and we have all the essentials.”

Intel and Nvidia don’t give Bergman any nightmares, or if they do, he doesn’t remember them when he wakes up. He said that Intel’s Larrabee is not a threat because it’s overpowered the die sizes are too big.

By concentrating on the GPU rather than the CPU, Nvidia has made a mistake, reckoned Bergman.

He’s not even bothered about ARM, which has an office just down the road from the Lone Star AMD campus. He doubts that ARM will go down the X86 path. But then ARM doesn’t need to do that, does it?

Said Bergman: “We’ll have a breadth of Fusion solutions and one of them will be a quad core.” That’s going to give good X86 performance, he reckons.

And in between now and 2011? AMD has several tricks up its sleeve on the big core little core front. In 2011, he said, Ontario will be a very compelling solution.

What’s Ontario? One of the hacks in the room said that a Japanese site has just published a set of slides about cores in 2010 and more importantly in 2011. We think hexus.net has a link to them. Ah yes, here.

Here we see Leo, Dorado, the Scorpius and the Lynx based on the Llano APU; and Sabine, and Brazius based on the Ontario APU (accelerated processing unit). APU is another of Mr Bergman's mantras.